We are taught that life is a series of beginnings, middles, and ends.
But it is not always that way in music.
As elementary music teachers, it is about beginnings and middles. Ends are something way down the road.
I know what you might be thinking.
“Yo, Holmes, there has to be an arc of beginnings, middles, and ends for directors and performance ensembles when focusing on preparing for a concert. And every class has a beginning, middle, and end, right?”
True. And monetizing music requires that the product be complete, too.
But the idea of making music is much more open ended in the elementary general music classroom.
I’m always amazed at general music lesson plans that on the surface embrace the beginning, middle, and end of a collegiate concept in such a neat, tight, tidy fashion.
Nothing could be further from real life or truth.
It gets even more stupefying when the end product of the lesson plan is a musical composition.
Times that by two if the teacher has spent no time in their career actually pursuing composition but believes that they are enough of an an authority to teach it.
So many of these contrived lessons and curriculums have all the charm of a neglected ficus. They are like verbose cook book recipes that promise if followed them, The result will be a beautifully finished musical soufflé in a 45-minute class.
Bon apitite! But diners beware: the main course may be a little under-cooked.
Music teachers who perseverate with their elementary school students on musical concepts like music history, vocabulary, or the dreaded musical game, approach “teaching” with an “I know something that you don’t and you need to learn it” attitude.
The act of producing musical sounds works under a different set of realities.
When little kids look up to you, are they looking for more words or for music?
Authentic musicians share little sequential techniques with kids and then provide them with the time and opportunity to play with these ideas, free of any ersatz requirement for a timed finished product.
Just because we plant the seed doesn’t mean that we will be around to see the tree grow or revel in the fruit the fully mature tree produces.
We have to trust our instincts that what we start will continue to grow over the life of the student.
The seeds we plant can’t be dependent on what direction the next music teachers take either.
Hopefully their next teachers will assess kids, take them as they find them, and encourage them in their next steps and explorations.
Some music teachers bitch that the students they receive from Teacher X don’t know “important things” like how to write a major scale or the definitions of Italian and French tempo markings.
Don’t be that teacher.
Be thankful you have a student and you know what next to model.
More times than not, those whinny teachers are complaining about knowledge and not skills.
Why? Because their careers are an ex cathedra house of cards built on a handful of random musical facts they learned in college: words, concept, methods, vocabulary, techno talk – everything but actually making and producing music.
If they feel less than confident or successful creating or playing music on a variety of instruments, it’s much safer for them pontificating about music, codifying vocabulary, coloring pages, music word finds, all with hopes of dodging the piano-playing elephant in the room.
Heraclitus wrote in “Fragments”, “Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
The same can be said about music and children.
When kids play, they are never in a hurry. Time is limitless to them. They haven’t learned the adult rules of the game, namely that time is finite and has a nasty habit of dictating when the game is over.
If you watch kids play any game, you’ll notice a constant that runs through all their play: they change and modify the rules to the situation at hand. They don’t look at the rules of the game as a constitutional scholar looks at the Constitution.If the rules don’t work – Shazaam! - the game is afoot with a new set of rules.
Kids need this freedom to modify and mollify the rules when they play with instruments. As modeling musicians, we need to step back after we show them a few things.
Let them play – and learn - on their terms.
We’ll always be there for guidance for those that get confused and stray a bit but our real calling is in encouraging and praising those who take the seeds we give them and start their own garden.
The following video is over twenty minutes long but it encapsulates the work I did with the New Castle Elementary School students, K through 5, on piano in 2015.
2015 was incredible time of immensely positive convergences at NCE. Nikki Jones, one of the best educators ever, was principal, Rich Bryson was a confident and resourceful student advisor, I was sharing music duties with one of the finest, Fred Higgins, and from top to bottom, we had an solid group of teachers who knew how to support each other and pull for the common good of the kids and their families.
For over eighty percent of these kids, it was the first year in music that they had ever touched or played a piano.
There are three threads you’ll notice through all six grades as you watch the video.
First, the kids approach piano like play.
Second, they are always modifying the rules and ideas I lay out for them.
And third, the kids excel at teaching one another.
Seven years have passed since these kids played piano in our music room video. I was at New Castle Elementary only one more year before being transferred to Wilbur Elementary.
I think about those NCE kids a lot, still laugh at the question they ask at the end of the video, and hope they are still making music every chance they get.
I’ve learned that piano is a lot like that quote by Maya Angelou.
Kids may forget what they played on the piano.
They may forget what they learned on the piano.
But they will never forget how they felt playing the piano when they were young.
And that feeling will always draw them back to the piano and other instruments. That feeling will allow that seed to grow a bit more, as Bobby “Blue” Bland sang, “further on up the road”.
But it is not always that way in music.
As elementary music teachers, it is about beginnings and middles. Ends are something way down the road.
I know what you might be thinking.
“Yo, Holmes, there has to be an arc of beginnings, middles, and ends for directors and performance ensembles when focusing on preparing for a concert. And every class has a beginning, middle, and end, right?”
True. And monetizing music requires that the product be complete, too.
But the idea of making music is much more open ended in the elementary general music classroom.
I’m always amazed at general music lesson plans that on the surface embrace the beginning, middle, and end of a collegiate concept in such a neat, tight, tidy fashion.
Nothing could be further from real life or truth.
It gets even more stupefying when the end product of the lesson plan is a musical composition.
Times that by two if the teacher has spent no time in their career actually pursuing composition but believes that they are enough of an an authority to teach it.
So many of these contrived lessons and curriculums have all the charm of a neglected ficus. They are like verbose cook book recipes that promise if followed them, The result will be a beautifully finished musical soufflé in a 45-minute class.
Bon apitite! But diners beware: the main course may be a little under-cooked.
Music teachers who perseverate with their elementary school students on musical concepts like music history, vocabulary, or the dreaded musical game, approach “teaching” with an “I know something that you don’t and you need to learn it” attitude.
The act of producing musical sounds works under a different set of realities.
When little kids look up to you, are they looking for more words or for music?
Authentic musicians share little sequential techniques with kids and then provide them with the time and opportunity to play with these ideas, free of any ersatz requirement for a timed finished product.
Just because we plant the seed doesn’t mean that we will be around to see the tree grow or revel in the fruit the fully mature tree produces.
We have to trust our instincts that what we start will continue to grow over the life of the student.
The seeds we plant can’t be dependent on what direction the next music teachers take either.
Hopefully their next teachers will assess kids, take them as they find them, and encourage them in their next steps and explorations.
Some music teachers bitch that the students they receive from Teacher X don’t know “important things” like how to write a major scale or the definitions of Italian and French tempo markings.
Don’t be that teacher.
Be thankful you have a student and you know what next to model.
More times than not, those whinny teachers are complaining about knowledge and not skills.
Why? Because their careers are an ex cathedra house of cards built on a handful of random musical facts they learned in college: words, concept, methods, vocabulary, techno talk – everything but actually making and producing music.
If they feel less than confident or successful creating or playing music on a variety of instruments, it’s much safer for them pontificating about music, codifying vocabulary, coloring pages, music word finds, all with hopes of dodging the piano-playing elephant in the room.
Heraclitus wrote in “Fragments”, “Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
The same can be said about music and children.
When kids play, they are never in a hurry. Time is limitless to them. They haven’t learned the adult rules of the game, namely that time is finite and has a nasty habit of dictating when the game is over.
If you watch kids play any game, you’ll notice a constant that runs through all their play: they change and modify the rules to the situation at hand. They don’t look at the rules of the game as a constitutional scholar looks at the Constitution.If the rules don’t work – Shazaam! - the game is afoot with a new set of rules.
Kids need this freedom to modify and mollify the rules when they play with instruments. As modeling musicians, we need to step back after we show them a few things.
Let them play – and learn - on their terms.
We’ll always be there for guidance for those that get confused and stray a bit but our real calling is in encouraging and praising those who take the seeds we give them and start their own garden.
The following video is over twenty minutes long but it encapsulates the work I did with the New Castle Elementary School students, K through 5, on piano in 2015.
2015 was incredible time of immensely positive convergences at NCE. Nikki Jones, one of the best educators ever, was principal, Rich Bryson was a confident and resourceful student advisor, I was sharing music duties with one of the finest, Fred Higgins, and from top to bottom, we had an solid group of teachers who knew how to support each other and pull for the common good of the kids and their families.
For over eighty percent of these kids, it was the first year in music that they had ever touched or played a piano.
There are three threads you’ll notice through all six grades as you watch the video.
First, the kids approach piano like play.
Second, they are always modifying the rules and ideas I lay out for them.
And third, the kids excel at teaching one another.
Seven years have passed since these kids played piano in our music room video. I was at New Castle Elementary only one more year before being transferred to Wilbur Elementary.
I think about those NCE kids a lot, still laugh at the question they ask at the end of the video, and hope they are still making music every chance they get.
I’ve learned that piano is a lot like that quote by Maya Angelou.
Kids may forget what they played on the piano.
They may forget what they learned on the piano.
But they will never forget how they felt playing the piano when they were young.
And that feeling will always draw them back to the piano and other instruments. That feeling will allow that seed to grow a bit more, as Bobby “Blue” Bland sang, “further on up the road”.
RSS Feed